One of his young friends in whose latent literary powers he had faith and whom stress of circumstances had brought into financial difficulties, one day came to see him. Another visitor interrupted their conversation and Mr. Whittier did not get the opportunity to say to her what he would have liked to say.
The poet, however, was a man of resources. The way of speech being blocked, he took the path of suggestion. He made her a gift of some new pens—“to try.”
But the poet who gathered this circle of young people about him, holding them by the charm of his personality, who said that the way to keep young was to be with the young, who delighted in youth even to the last, giving evidence in himself that age is but the youth of immortality, was yet to youth, as he was to maturity, a leader—his judgment, not theirs, dominated.
This was the case one autumn day as he sat in the garden room smilingly listening to the pleadings of a bright and interesting member of that large family of his “boys and girls.”
She wanted the poet to put his autograph at the bottom of a blank sheet of paper, that something might be written over it. She most carefully specified what this was to be. There had been a joke about something that had taken place in the summer when both had been at the mountains, and, not herself, but some one else, was to write this page. But she vouched for exactly what it should be.
Mr. Whittier laughingly turned her from the point. Until at last she rose to leave. He accompanied her to the door. The writer seems still to see the girl standing on the doorstep and looking with a laugh, and yet a coaxing, into the face of the poet as she reiterated her plea—and to see him from the threshold gazing down upon her, enjoying the light in her clear brown eyes and the saucy tilt of her head, and answering with exceeding gravity of tone:
“My name is not worth anything, now that the Eastern Railroad stocks have gone so low.”
Then both laughed. And the visitor departed—without the autograph.